Selkirk CAO touts decommissioned gas plant as home for new Manitoba Hydro generating station
East Selkirk station decommissioned in 2021, when Hydro said it had all the power it needs
The City of Selkirk's chief administrative officer wants Manitoba Hydro to consider building a proposed fuel-combustion generating station on the site of an East Selkirk plant the Crown corporation had shut down less than four years ago.
On Tuesday, Manitoba Hydro asked the Public Utilities Board to review a $1.36-billion cost estimate for a pair of fuel-combustion turbines capable of generating 500 megawatts of electricity.
The Crown corporation hopes to complete the station, which may run on natural gas, before the winter of 2029-30 in order to produce electricity on demand during cold snaps.
Duane Nicol, Selkirk's chief administrative officer, says he hopes Hydro will consider reusing the site of the Selkirk Generating Station, which operated across the Red River in the Rural Municipality of St. Clements between 1961 and 2021.
"A few short years later, we're talking about putting up a $1.4-billion new plant. So I think at the very least, it should be explored how this infrastructure could potentially be used," Nicol said Thursday in an interview.
The Selkirk Generating Station burned coal for its first four decades and was converted to natural gas in 2002. Hydro decommissioned the 132-megawatt generating station between July 2020 and April 2021, declaring it was no longer needed following the completion of the 695-megawatt Keeyask hydroelectric generating station on the Nelson River.
"We can supply more than enough power with our hydroelectric stations. We no longer need the extra capacity Selkirk Generating Station provides," Hydro vice-president Shane Mailey was quoted as saying in a 2020 news release.
Three years later, in 2023, Manitoba Hydro reassessed the province's electricity needs. The skyrocketing demand for electricity led the Crown corporation to declare Manitoba needs to double or even triple its 6,120-megawatt generating capacity by the 2040s.
Its former CEO then declared in 2024 that Manitoba could face power shortages by 2029 without new sources of electricity.
Nicol said while the old Selkirk station's turbines cannot be retrofitted, the land remains available and the site could be reconnected to both transmission lines and a supply of natural gas, should Manitoba Hydro decide to use gas as a fuel source in the new station.
"There might be some savings to be had," Nicol said. "The transmission infrastructure is there. The natural gas line is there. There are buildings on site and even if those don't fit, there's lots of land."
Manitoba Hydro has not identified potential locations for its proposed new plant and has not determined what fuel it intends to burn at the facility.
Adrien Sala, the government minister responsible for Manitoba Hydro, said the Crown corporation will consider natural gas, hydrogen and renewable natural gas, which is a purified methane derived from compost, sewage treatment and other biological processes.
Natural gas poses a political issue for Sala's NDP government, which has promised to wean Manitoba Hydro off fossil fuels by 2035.
Manitoba Hydro currently operates one natural gas plant — the 280-megawatt Brandon Generating Station, which produces power on demand during cold snaps and droughts.
Keith Brooks, the programs manager at Environmental Defence, an Ontario-based non-profit organization, advised Manitoba Hydro against building a new natural gas plant at a time when most of the world is trying to transition away from using fossil fuels as an energy source.
"Manitoba Hydro and the premier of Manitoba are interested in decarbonization and have a goal around phasing out the use of the existing gas-fired generator by 2035. Building a new one in in 2025 or 2026 just does not make sense," Brooks said in an interview from Toronto.
Brooks also said hydrogen is expensive to produce and store, while renewable natural gas does not exist in quantities sufficient to fuel a generating station.
"To be able to get enough of a reliable source of renewable natural gas to fire a plant like this, I think that would be a challenge," he said. "So it's not just expensive, it's logistically difficult to do that, and you don't have a pipeline feeding it in. You'd need to store it somewhere, which is the same problem you have with hydrogen."
Brooks advised Manitoba to deal with its impending electricity capacity crunch by conserving energy, replacing radiant heat with fuel pumps in homes and building batteries to store electricity.
He also advised the province to build more wind farms — something the province plans to do, albeit not in time to avoid the danger of winter power shortages by 2029.
Manitoba plans to create 600 megawatts of new generating capacity through wind farms built by Indigenous-led businesses.
Brooks said Manitoba should be able to meet its own power needs with hydroelectric, wind and solar power.
"A lot of jurisdictions have a lot further to stretch than Manitoba does," he said. "So you've got one gas plant — keep that one around in case of an emergency, but the goal should be to take your very best effort at trying to fully decarbonize the grid to get to that net zero goal."
The Hydro critic for Manitoba's Progressive Conservative opposition, meanwhile, urged the NDP government to pursue the natural gas option for the proposed new plant.
"The NDP needs to put their ideology aside and look at the lowest-cost and most reliable option for Manitoba," said Lauren Stone, the PC MLA for Midland. "A natural gas power plant can be built within the next 12 to 18 months. It could be done pretty quickly.
"Manitoba does need that additional capacity, even with renewables."
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